Songwriters From The United States

""Poetry is like language soup, the taste of different flavors. Sometimes you just like the way a word sounds, pressed up against another word." She said poetry was contagious. In a good way. (p184)"

"I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that — if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world. (2012)"

"I say with Naomi Nye, "savoring the close experience of local and international kinship, This is the nectar off which I will feed.""

"Palestinians are all haunted. We’re haunted by what used to be, what could have been, what we dream could be, what we would prefer for all the people who are living there right in the heart of it—and have everything at stake. (2024)"

"I think of poets over the ages sending their voices out into the sky, leaving quiet, indelible trails."

"When people tilt their heads just slightly to imagine another person's experience, the space inside the mind grows. (2019)"

"In Jerusalem so much old anger floated around, echoed from fading graffiti, seeped out of cracks. Sometimes it bumped into new anger in the streets. The air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names. (p89)"

"It’s pretty intriguing to follow Naomi Shihab Nye’s idea that most of us actually “think in poems,” whether we know it or not. What she commends as a simple practice of writing explains the surprising power of what I know best from a long life of journaling. The act of writing things down just helps. As she says, it can be a tool to survive in hard times, or to anchor our days, but also to get into a more gracious community with ourselves — or rather, with all of the selves that live on in each of us at any given moment: the “child self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes.” Naomi Shihab Nye was long a self-professed “wandering poet.” Today she’s the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation, while also a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. And one poem she wrote, called “Kindness,” is held close by people around the world."

"Whenever someone suggests "how much is lost in translation!" I want to say, "Perhaps but how much is gained!" A new world of readers, for one thing."

"On the board was written, "Poetry is a wide-open field." (p183)"

""You will need to be brave. There are hard days coming. There are hard words waiting in people’s mouths to be spoken. There are walls. You can’t break them. Just find doors in them." (p258)"

"Perhaps we have more voices in the air now-on TV, in our phones and computers and little saved videos-but are we able to hear them as well? Are these the voices we really need? Is our listening life-space deep enough? Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible? Can we go outside and listen?"

"The magic trick of Naomi Nye's writing is to render the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic through apparently effortless feats of perception and language."

"those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like...How do they maintain any shred of dignity and balance? You know those are the courageous people to me. All the-- simple people of the earth who-- don't lose their sanity in the face of-- constant-- disease in the world they live in. Who keep sending their children to school, who keep combing their children's hair. How do they do that? (2002)"

"Think of it: two peoples, so closely related it's hard to tell them apart in the streets sometimes, claiming the same land. The end of the twentieth century."

"Tear gas canisters scattered in the fields by Israeli soldiers say, "Made in Pennsylvania."...I keep thinking of those signs in the United States at construction sites: YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK HERE."

"the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle."

"That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing."

"What did exclusivity ever have to offer but a distorted, unrealistic view of the world? People who stuck only to their own kind were scared people"

"This is what I want a book of poems and paintings to be-a surprising spring waking us from our daily sleep. A feast of little dishes. An unexpected walk along the rim of a majestic city. Ahlan Wa Sahlan-You are all welcome!"

"I can't stop believing human beings everywhere hunger for deeper-than-headline news about one another. Poetry and art are some of the best ways this heartfelt "news" may be exchanged."

"I think I said this like 40 years ago in a poem — use a single word as an oar that could get you through the days, just by holding a word, thinking about it differently, and seeing how that word rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words. There’s a luxury in that kind of thinking about language and text, but it’s very basic, as well. It’s simple. It’s invisible. It doesn’t cost anything."

"In these days when "trade" is an amplified word, with the images of appliances and factories and skills flying back and forth across a border, I prefer to imagine cultures trading invisible riches."

"Salma Khadra al-Jayusi has been instrumental in her role as a transmitter of Arabic literature."

"I suggest that blood be bigger than what we're born with, that blood keep growing and growing as we live; otherwise how will we become true citizens of the world? For twenty years, working as a visiting writer in dozens of schools in my city and elsewhere. I have carried poems by writers of many cultures into classrooms, feeling the large family of voices linking human experience. We have no borders when we read."

"The things that cause you friction are the things from which you might make art. Surely losing is one of the most endemic frictions of our journey."

"I wasn't the kid who got involved in the streets. I liked to be at home with my family."

"I would strongly suggest that bicultural families such as mine teach their children both languages from the beginning if they can."

"There may be nothing more "basic" in education than gaining a sense of one's own voice. By acknowledging and shaping shared experience, we grow bigger. Poems help us see the world around us as rich material. And nothing is better than reading the work of our peers, as well as the work of older poets, to get us going in our particular terrain. A poem we love makes us want to write our own-hand to hand, map to map, contagious, delicious voices spinning us forward inside our cluttered, clattering lives."

"Outside, the sky felt deep and dark as if a large soft blanket had been thrown over the hills and valleys. (p54)"

"Language is its own music."

"if you read the poems of someone somewhere you know a lot more about that country than you know if you just study its crops or weather conditions."

"It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness."

"So how can we continue to help-be tuning forks in some way? I guess that's the job of writers. We're tuning forks. We strike a note and it's not what we sing, so much, just that we strike this note-and then that note resonates in someone else's life, maybe they hear a harmonious note in their own lives."

"Savvy writer"

"Arab culture is full of great story tellers, and it is one of the favorite pastimes of Arab people. I think that there is a deep hunger in the human psyche for story and the nourishment it gives us. People don't live on one level chatter alone, rhetoric or just the conveyance of news. We need the threading and layering of a day that story gives us, and that's very much from the culture."

"what lovely, larger life becomes ours when we listen to one another"

"details have always been the doorway by which we approach and apprehend the larger things of the world, the larger truths, whatever they might be."

"I don't understand how people can disconnect politics from daily life, because that's how politics count. We're daily life people and that's where politics become a reality to us."

"Maybe the hardest thing about moving overseas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together with little pieces. (p80)"

"Aref kept thinking that no matter what you say, there is something more inside that you can't say. You talk around it in a circle, like stirring water with a stick, when ripples swirl out from the center. (p. 259)"

"Especially when you write, I think, you become cognizant of the little threads carrying us along everywhere, tying us together and linking us up."

"born on a bridge between two cultures, poet Naomi Shihab Nye is like a brilliant, talkative telephone operator in the Global Village: she plugs the reader in, makes connections, audacious comments, lyrical phrases."

"Naomi Shihab Nye, for her poems, sisterhood, and heart."

""How should we use poetry?" people sometimes ask me. Read it! Share it with one another! Find poems that make you resonate. Different poems will do this for every person. We "use poetry" to restore us to feeling, revitalize our own speech, awaken empathy."

"In the midst of public jabber, high-velocity advertising, and shameless television, where is one true word? Where are three? Who will pause long enough to describe something truly, and clearly? Where is the burn of speech, the sweet rub of language, the spark that links us? Poetry, poetry! Rearranging right at the heart level, where standardized tests often don't go. I think our frenzied days are hungry for the kind of quietude poetry offers. It doesn't take long to weave it into our lives."

"I kept thinking, as did millions of other people, what can we do? Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough. I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry. But many of us have always turned to poetry. Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name."

"I have always thought about how stupid and boring violence seems in this world where we could just listen to more stories instead, right? We could ask people who trouble us, Could you tell me your story? Usually I have found when you ask someone to do that, you end up feeling closer to them, even if their story in no way mirrors yours. Find a better thing to do."

"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in."

"I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!"